rah@shipwright.com:
I'll try to to come at this from another tack. Cryptography gives anonymity. Anononymity reduces the overhead. The reduced overhead should make digital cash more economically efficient than on-line systems like NetBank, or credit-cards or much of anything else, at the moment. The
If someone did an operation count of Brands' digicash protocol, I wouldn't be surprised if it showed much more processing than, for instance, the simple public (or even secret) key encrypt-a-credit-card-number scheme. The latter has the overhead of transaction management - but the table lookup of databases is much simpler than modular exponentiation. Then there's the 'loose change' problem - one I haven't seen discussed too much. It seems that Bob will have to total up whatever he received from Alice and anyone else, then have notes _reissued_ from the bank in his chosen denominations - otherwise Bob could double-spend _Alice_'s cash, exposing her identity and getting away scot-free himself. The loose change is in choosing the note denominations - you don't have to go to a bank to change a 100 in 'real life'. Compare this with paper money. Cash has to be printed. Granted this is cheap, particularly with US Dollars, probably the easiest currency to forge. (Even Indian Rupees are gravure printed in multiple colours and textures. I was really laughing at the discussion here a while ago on how easy it is to pull out the metal strip from dollars - Rupees have metal woven in to the paper, which reflects light at an angle and is opaque, black, when seen through). Then there's the overhead of distribution, the 'loose change' - how many suitcase-fulls to buy a Boeing? Cheques (drafts, cards) are much simpler. There is a one-time overhead of customer verification when you get your account. Transaction-time verification is relatively simple. The additional overhead of transaction record management is easily implemented even in existing electronic systems. If it weren't for Cypherpunks, anonymous cash would die a natural death as money gets wired. Anon cash _is_ value added. And I don't see why there shouldn't be a market. We have least 700 already ;-) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab@dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA